Social trading is a great way to provide a free learning tool for other traders and even for yourself as you can conveniently document your stock market activity with commentary and screenshots that detail your trades. Contributing to the Profit.ly platform and even starting your own independent blog are just two ways of doing this.  

At first glance, it seemed pretty cool to share my journey from a few hundred dollars to $1M in trading profits - start to finish. Especially with other novice traders doing the same like JC Trades.

However, in the last few months, I have found social trading to be quite distracting for me personally. When compared to the old days of when I would double / triple a nano-sized account, worrying about how my trades look in the public eye has seriously started to affect the way I trade.

For instance, instead of allowing a familiar pattern to play out where I'd rake in 30-40%, I will take a quick 5-10% profit so that I could "win" the trade in order to increase my win percentage and to add more green to my recent trades, as opposed to maximizing profits on an easy "gimme".

My focus then turned to creating beautiful drawings on my TOS screencaps like some grade school arts and crafts project that I could refer back to in the future when I'm teaching others to trade. I was looking too far in the future and losing sight of what is right in front of me.

It is because of this personal issue why I've decided to lay off the daily heavy commentary, detailed screenshots of where I bought/sold and the over-analyzing of my trades so that I can better focus on becoming the best trader I can be. I'm going back to the basics of what made me into a good trader originally:

* STUDY, STUDY, STUDY (I recently purchased "How to Make Millions")

* doing my homework (nightly watchlist building)

* remaining focused (waking up early)

* and sticking to my rules/trading plan (taking profits at the ideal time)

Nothing more, nothing less.

In the meantime, I'm going to return to simple screenshots saved to my computer without carefully drawn out lines and captions. And trades uploaded to my Profit.ly account on a bi-weekly or monthly schedule. I just don't give a damn about sharing at this point.

When the $100K profit line is crossed and I'm more stable and secure as a FT trader, I will then dedicate more time to sharing my experience. But first things first, I gotta figure myself out. 

Goodbye transparency, Hello obscrurity!

Until next time,

Ryan Dodson a.k.a. Sooth_Sayer